When 13-year-old Kitty Mcguire of Troy killed herself in March, the focus immediately turned to the girl's life at school, with bullying as a possible reason for her untimely death. A police investigation ensued. But as Jennifer Mitchell reports, the outcome leaves as many questions as it answers.

Related Media

Investigation Into Troy Girl's Suicide Leaves Unan

Duration:1:55

Kitty was a sixth-grader at Mount View Middle School in Waldo County, and according to published reports, she may have been a victim of bullying and harrassment at school, and on the school bus. Some students had reported to the authorities that she was sometimes teased over her clothes and style.

Family members, such as her uncle and grandparents, further alleged that because Kitty was questioning her sexual identity, she had become the target of repeated harrassment, some of it physical. But the police say if that was the case, there was scant evidence that any such incidents contributed to Kitty's decision to take her own life.

"We weren't really able to come up with anything as far as why, a definitive reason about why it happened," says Jeffrey Trafton, chief deputy with the Waldo County Sheriff's Department.

Trafton says that his officers questioned the school, and the girl's friends and family, and came away with conflicting reports about what the school district had recognized as incidents of "teasing."

"Some of the folks that the detectives interviewed didn't think that bullying was an issue at all, and others did," he says. "And so, without being able to talk with her, and find out exactly from her how it was affecting her, we weren't able to make any kind of definitive determination."

And he says in the 24 hours prior to Kitty's suicide, no one admitted to having seen the girl in distress, or noticed anything unusual or unhappy in her demeanor. Bullying, he says, can be very difficult for law enforcement to prove, because every witness has a different idea of what bullying is, and what it is not.

Phone calls to the family and RSU 3 school district were not returned by air time. But according to a report in the Bangor Daily News, some members of the Mcguire family are not satisfied with the conclusions drawn by the police report.

They say they remain convinced that schoolyard bullying was a factor in Kitty Mcguire's death, and they're hoping that the school's ongoing internal investigation turns up something more conclusive.